Fractured Fairy Tales and Fragmented Markets

Abstract

This article analyzes the institutional and textual features of a Lifetime Television series called Weddings of a Lifetime. It argues that the synergistic melding of Disney, ABC, and Lifetime in Weddings of a Lifetime not only typifies media industry strategies in an age of conglomeration but also evidences the complex textual meanings produced through such institutional practices. In this case, Disney’s cross-promotional efforts at once bolster and challenge the company’s vested interests in the ideologies of heterosexual romance and marriage. While the linkages between Disney properties maximize the program’s selling power, those same linkages, along with the series’ blurred generic boundaries and pretensions to “reality,” fracture the idealized fairy tale that its stories of romance and marriage ostensibly relate. The article seeks to extend the discussion of media conglomeration into a specific case study to examine the effects of this institutional development on a media product.